Prince Harvey rapped his entire record in the Apple store.
Photograph: PR

For most of us, the Apple store is a place to buy aspirational goods, witness the word “genius” being massively undermined, and, if you’re a teenage boy, to try to leave a mildly explicit image on a Macbook Air. But for rapper Prince Harvey, the outlet in Soho, New York, became an entire recording studio. Using the GarageBand app and an inbuilt microphone, he recorded a whole album in secret while in store, on a display laptop.

“A friend of mine said I could have his apartment because he was moving to LA – but he didn’t tell me he owed the landlord rent,” Harvey says. “Within three days, the locks were changed, and all my musical equipment and computer were seized – all I had were my clothes.” Soon Harvey was going to the Apple store every weekday, eventually racking up four months there creating his album Phatass (an acronym for Prince Harvey at the Apple store Soho).

“There were no chairs – I had to stand there for four or five hours at a time,” he says. “I’d get there in the morning and leave at lunchtime. I never used the bathroom – I’d go before I left home. As far as fashion goes, I’m pretty flamboyant, but I wanted to draw as little attention to myself as possible: I’d wear black jeans, white shoes and a black trenchcoat.”

Even keeping his head down, he was initially moved on by store staff. “There were two employees who then said: ‘Hey, what he’s doing is really positive and creative. If anything, him demo-ing the equipment will drive sales.’ At the mention of sales, the managers kind of got with it.”

He kept the mic close and set to a low level to avoid passing chatter, though would occasionally get interrupted by shoppers. “Sometimes I would get a little loud – a lot of my music has profanity, so there were some stares,” he laughs. “People would also ask me for tips on GarageBand – after a while I almost felt like a surrogate employee there.”

He’s not the first to make the most of such apps, rather than pay out for a 48-track studio setup: Fall Out Boy and Courtney Love have used GarageBand for ad hoc demos, while Kate Nash and T-Pain recorded their breakthrough hits on it – even the backbeat for Rihanna’s Umbrella sounds remarkably similar to a stock rhythm bundled with the software.

Harvey’s story has since gone viral, with rapper Talib Kwelipraising him on Twitter. He’s now a 21st-century Horatio Alger, pulling himself up to the top through ingenuity and hard work. “It gave me the idea that I should make a better situation for myself, so that I can be the one walking into the Apple store saying: ‘Two thousand dollars? Fine,’” he says. I hear a lot of artists use excuses about why they’re not successful, and I can’t really listen to that.”

Oh, and he’s got a new computer. “I’m not waiting around for Apple to give me a free laptop because I gave them a bunch of free press. No, I went out and muscled up some money. This is what I do: I’m a go-getter.”